by Judi Dench
We stayed in the Hotel Waterford, which had a great long neon sign at the side, and when it lit up at night we expected it to say Hotel Waterford, but instead it said Hotel Inexpensive, which amused us all no end. I had to fly back to London for a recital on the first weekend, and nobody had yet seen the rushes. So I said, ‘If when I come back there is a towel hanging out of a window, I’ll know that the rushes are all right and I can come in.’ There was a towel hanging out of a window, so I was very relieved.
Finty was only six years old when this was made, so I forbade her to watch it then. It was re-shown in New York not so long ago, and then I read in the paper that I didn’t want it to be screened again here. I had made no comment whatsoever about it, so I don’t know who thought they spoke on my behalf.
There was no risk of any nude scenes in Love in a Cold Climate. Simon Raven adapted Nancy Mitford’s novel, and we all wore beautiful Thirties costumes. A bonus for me was that Michael was also in the cast, with old friends like John Moffatt and Job Stewart. Donald McWhinnie was the director, and it must have been a nightmare for him to schedule, as it was shot during the ITV technicians’ work-to-rule in 1979, meaning that our first call on location was not until 11 a.m., and we had to wrap at 4 p.m. so that the crew could travel in normal working hours. For the actors it meant that we were left at the hotel enjoying long evenings and great meals; we had such a good time, which I recall with great pleasure when I am called for 6 a.m. so often these days.
It was also the shortest rehearsal time I have ever known. I remember rehearsing a scene once with John Moffatt, and Donald just shrugged and said, ‘Fine, finished for the day.’ Moff and I left the room looking at our watches, saying, ‘Seven minutes, that’s a pretty good rehearsal time.’ Whenever we asked, ‘Donald, don’t you want to do it again?’ he just replied, ‘No, I don’t want you to get stale. I’ve cast it perfectly, why bother to go on?’
He had too, with the cast including Michael Aldridge, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Patience Collier, Adrienne Corri, Lucy Gutteridge, and Vivian Pickles. The locations were where the Mitford family had lived, and many of the characters were based on real people. Not surprisingly, the locals used to come and watch the filming, taking an exceptional interest in what we were doing. One rather grand lady asked me, ‘And who are you?’ I said I was playing Sadie, Lady Alconleigh. ‘Oh yes, I knew her very well. She was very, very tall, and very, very pretty.’ She paused, and looked at me, and then added, ‘But I suppose you’ll do it with acting.’ I got much taller from then on.
We had to travel from one place in Warwickshire to another location about five miles away, so three of us were driven there in a huge vintage Daimler by a uniformed chauffeur. We were sitting in the back in our cloche hats, without a camera in sight. It was as if we had all suddenly gone back in time. We had the most glorious ten months working on it, and when the union went on strike in the middle of it we were all kept on retainers. I am not at all sure that would happen today, in a very different TV era.
The series was a great success abroad as well as here, and it tickled my sense of humour that the very first country to buy Love in a Cold Climate was Iceland. I do hope they knew what they were getting.
Everything I made for television up until then was set in this country, so I was initially thrilled to be offered Saigon – Year of the Cat. David Hare had written the script about the final days of the American evacuation of the city, and Stephen Frears was the director. Again the production company was Thames Television, who were still struggling with their union problems. So poor Stephen had even more trouble with the filming schedule in Thailand than Donald had had in England, as the daily rosters were organised from London, not Bangkok.
I was playing Barbara, an English bank clerk who has an affair with an American CIA agent, played by Frederic Forrest. Unfortunately, Freddy had worked with Marlon Brando on another Vietnam movie – Apocalypse Now. Brando told him to improvise his lines rather than say those that were in the script. David and Stephen went wild, but they tried being very diplomatic about it. It didn’t help that Freddy was also very angry about the whole business of America being blamed for the Vietnam War.
There were problems with the helicopters provided by the Thai Army for the evacuation at the end, and the day before we shot it there was a huge disaster between two Chinooks on that same airfield. So Stephen hid the newspapers from me, though in fact I would have drawn comfort from that, thinking that if it is going to happen one day, it won’t happen the next, will it?
Eventually, the union situation made it impossible to carry on shooting in Bangkok. I was beginning to get homesick, and all the delays made me miss Finty even more, so David and Stephen arranged to fly her and Michael out for the last couple of weeks. She was already a good swimmer at the age of ten, so she was in her element, and it was in Thailand that she learnt to dive. She swam with Clarke Peters, who was in the film, and she has never forgotten that he couldn’t float. We were all in this huge swimming pool, he would lie on the top and simply go straight down and lie on the bottom.
Then they stopped the filming, and nine months later we finished it back at Shepperton Studios and Battersea Park. We had all lost our tropical tans by then, so had to spend some time on sunbeds to get them back. It was very cold when we shot the bedroom scenes, and we had to be sprayed with water to make us look sweaty and hot and tropical. David Hare said that it was the most nightmarish shoot he had ever experienced, and it was a miracle that the finished film worked as well as it did.
All of my decisions about work are based on who I am going to work with – actors, writers or directors. The main reason I accepted the offer of Jean in the TV series As Time Goes By was so that I could work with Geoffrey Palmer, because there is nobody with a drier sense of comedy, he is a real master. He never even trained at drama school, he went into the Marines. Do the Marines teach you to be a very good comedy actor? Perhaps they should put that on their recruiting posters: ‘Join the Marines and become a very, very good comedy actor.’
When we had met briefly a couple of times before this, we had not got off to a very good start. The first time was one Christmas, when I was in the General Trading Company in Chelsea with Finty, and I thought he was trying to pick me up. He said loudly, ‘I’d rather be anywhere in the world than here.’ He told me later that he nearly didn’t say hello in case I did think he was trying to pick me up.
The second time was worse. Tenniel Evans had been a friend since we were together in the York Cycle of Mystery Plays, and he was now thinking of becoming a lay priest. Geoffrey said to Tenniel, ‘Rubbish, you mustn’t do that.’ When Michael and I went to see An Evening with Peter Ustinov we found ourselves sitting right in front of the Palmers, so I turned round and said, ‘I hear what you’ve done to Tenniel Evans, how dare you!’
But I couldn’t resist the opportunity to work with him, and this sitcom was also written by Bob Larbey, who had written A Fine Romance, so I knew we were in good hands. This was the first time I worked with Syd Lotterby, but I knew he had directed such comedy classics as Porridge, Open All Hours, and Yes, Minister. Syd and Geoffrey took me out to lunch to talk about it, but what I didn’t know then was that Jean Simmons had been their first choice, until she decided to do a TV series in America instead. It was years later that that story finally leaked out, and I gave Geoffrey a hard time then for keeping it secret so long. This sitcom was a different kind of romance, between a nurse and a soldier who lose touch when he goes off to the Korean War. They marry other people, and meet by chance thirty-five years later when she is widowed and he is divorced. The mutual attraction is rekindled, and eventually they get married.
We got on very well, perhaps because we each prepared so differently. He used to read all the scripts for the entire series before we started on the first episode, while I arrived for the first read-through not even having read that one. I obviously have a terrible fear of doing so. There is something about the whole business of reading it in advance,
and discovering that there is a particular jump you have to clear. Unlike those jockeys who walk around Becher’s Brook before the Grand National, I would think, Well, I’ll know how high it is when I come to it. I wouldn’t be a careful jockey.
As a result we had to learn each episode’s script very quickly. The first read-through was on Tuesdays, and we had to be word-perfect by Friday for the run-through with all the camera crew. Saturday morning we had two fast run-throughs before I usually had to go off to do a matinee in the theatre, and camera rehearsal began at 10.30 a.m. on the Sunday, with the recording before a studio audience at 8 p.m. Monday was our one day off, then we started all over again on the next episode.
Geoffrey taught me to fine-tune my timing on television. He thinks I do too much, and I try not to, but sometimes I can’t resist another look, or another double-take. I am always rather nervous when he comes to see me in a play, because he speaks his mind very much, and I quite like that. What both of us did from quite early on in the rehearsals for As Time Goes By was to say, ‘Oh, we don’t need this line, I can get the laugh with just a look.’ Usually we did, too, but in situation comedy you sometimes get a very unexpected laugh that you didn’t think was there. Sometimes you don’t get one which you know is there, and that is even more irritating, because your timing goes completely out of the window. So to be really good at situation comedy is to be really skilled, like Geoffrey. With the other members of the regular cast – Moira Brooker, Jenny Funnell, Philip Bretherton, Moyra Fraser and Paul Chapman – we really were like a happy family.
Syd was a tower of strength too, he used to laugh and laugh so much, and that was really encouraging. Then at the Sunday night recording he would be flying up and down the stairs to the control room. When we had to come out and meet the studio audience he never liked us to say, ‘and behind you in the box is the wonderful Syd Lotterby’, he never liked us to say anything like that, but we did.
We all thought it would probably run for just one series, but that first one in 1991 had an audience of twelve million, so series two was immediately commissioned. At the end of every subsequent series we all thought it would be the last, but we finally did nine series from 1991 to 2002 before calling it a day. Even then, that was not quite the end, as the BBC asked us to come back for a couple of specials for showing over Christmas a few years later.
It proved hugely popular in America and Australia, and still is; I think they rerun the nine series in an almost continuous loop. Once, a great big parcel arrived at the studio with a message from a lady who said, ‘Jean would never have that quilt on her bed, here is the one she would have.’ I quite like them feeling that they knew us all so well as those characters, even if sometimes they thought that Geoffrey was my real husband. In America there is an As Time Goes By Internet Fan Club, and a whole group of them flew over in 2001 to see The Royal Family when I was playing that on the stage in London. What was both surprising and heart-warming about that visit was that they came in the aftermath of the terrible attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, when so many Americans stopped flying anywhere abroad for a while.
The only nasty thing that happened to me during all those years of making As Time Goes By was at the Press Call for the first series. A woman journalist had the extraordinary nerve to ask me: ‘Who was the first person you slept with, and where was that?’ I couldn’t believe my ears. I vowed I would never expose myself again to such offensive questioning, and nor have I.
13
From The Seagull to A Little Night Music
1993-1995
1993 WAS NOT MY HAPPIEST year. I finally stepped off what had become for me the treadmill of The Gift of the Gorgon, and I had an even more upsetting experience in my family life before the year was out. It happened during what was otherwise a wonderfully fulfilling experience – Radio 3’s celebration of John Gielgud’s ninetieth birthday with an all-star production of King Lear. This was transmitted on his actual birthday, 14 April 1994, but because of the logistics of gathering that supporting cast, it was recorded the previous September. Ken Branagh had proposed this as a Renaissance co-production with the BBC, and he played Edmund. I was cast as Goneril, and the rest of the cast list read like a Who’s Who in British Theatre, with even the tiny part of the Herald played by Peter Hall.
We recorded it over a week, and the night before the final studio day I drove home to Surrey. Finty was now living in our old Hampstead house with a couple of friends, and she was woken by the smell of smoke. A burning candle had set fire to the curtains, so she called the fire brigade, who were there until 4 a.m. Fortunately the girls decided to sleep downstairs, because the fire blazed up again a couple of hours later, and virtually gutted the house this time before it was put out. I rushed up there as fast as I could in the morning, and in my relief that no one was hurt, and my distress at seeing the burnt-out shell of our first married home, I just burst into tears.
I rang Glyn Dearman, who was directing King Lear, to say I would now be a bit late for the recording, but I would be OK to do it so long as no one mentioned the fire. He managed to warn everyone except Sir John, who rushed up to me as soon as he came into the studio and burst out, ‘Oh, Judi, my poor darling, are you insured?’ His concern was just too much for me, and I broke down, sobbing on his shoulder. I lost a lot of precious theatre mementoes in the fire, but then Sir John, with his usual thoughtful generosity, sent me a little box that Peggy Ashcroft had given him, to help replace them. The fire overshadowed the end of what had been a lovely week, although our star himself, self-critical as ever, wished we had had more rehearsal time to get it better.
After that difficult year it was very good to go back to the National Theatre, which turned out to be my stage home for the next five years. The first production was of The Seagull, directed by John Caird, whom I had known at Stratford, though we had never worked together before. He wanted to stage it in the Cottesloe, but Richard Eyre insisted that it had to be in the Olivier.
I love Chekhov, but Arkadina is a hard part to play. She behaves so appallingly, she is the most terrible mother that anyone has ever written. In the middle scene, when she woos Trigorin, I used to get Bill Nighy lying on the ground under me, and after every line of mine he used to say under his breath, ‘Oh, my God,’ which I am sure is exactly what Trigorin was feeling.
If there were ever the slightest risk of my taking myself, or a particular part, too seriously, I can always rely on my friends to send me up, and I still treasure a poem I received from John Moffatt during the rehearsals for this play:
Dame Judi Dench…known as Jude
Was excessively vulgar and lewd.
If she got no applause
She would shout ‘Up Yours!’
To the audience. Dreadfully rude!
From the first act right through to the last
She’d insult the rest of the cast.
She would sometimes yell ‘Balls!’
To the orchestra stalls
And leave ev’ryone simply aghast.
The director said sadly ‘Oh, dear,
Dame Judi’s too vulgar I fear.
For the lead in The Seagull
I’d have liked Anna Neagle.
What a pity she’s no longer here.
Next at the National was one of my very favourite plays, Absolute Hell by Rodney Ackland. This was partly at my instigation, as I had played Christine Foskett in the television production in 1991. It is based on a real Soho club, re-named La Vie en Rose, and is about the life of all these extraordinary bohemian people there at the end of the war. There was all the sleaziness of such a place, but the characters were touching and interesting. In those less permissive times of the early Fifties, when it was first staged in London, the critics panned it for its lack of morals, and it was taken off very quickly, to the great distress of its author.
Anthony Page persuaded the BBC to televise it in a rewritten version, and asked me to play the club owner, who was also based on a real person. By now Rodney Ack
land was old and frail, but he came to the studio recording in a wheelchair, and watching it he was moved to tears. I was saddened by his reaction, until he said to me, ‘I didn’t realise I had written such a good play.’ I had a wonderful drunk scene towards the end, and the whole thing was such fun to do, that I said to Anthony afterwards, ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely to do this in the theatre?’ Three years later we did, with a number of changes to the cast. Bill Nighy had played Hugh Marriner, a failed writer, on TV, now Greg Hicks took the part on stage, and my old friend from our schooldays, Peter Woodthorpe, was the terrible and overbearing film director Maurice Hussey.
I thought I had made Christine too genteel on TV, so I made her much coarser on stage, and more drunk. In fact, although we were of course only drinking coloured water, I used to feel absolutely stocious afterwards. I can remember one night saying to Greg Hicks as we were on our hands and knees, ‘How can we both be so drunk on coloured water?’ There was a whole atmosphere about that play that was quite heady, and there were great rewards in it, because although parts of it are very sad, other parts are very, very funny.
The set at the Lyttelton was the bar of this club, with some stairs up the side, and you couldn’t get out the back, it was all contained very nicely in this set. So when we disappeared behind the back to serve somebody, you couldn’t get out.
I was only sad that Rodney Ackland didn’t live to see his play as praised by the theatre critics as it had been by the TV critics, even if there were some remarks about ‘a flawed masterpiece’. It could have run for much longer, but the Lyttelton was needed for the next shows. It is still the play that if anyone asks me what I want to be doing tonight, my answer is Absolute Hell.
Happily, my next appearance at the National was also very rewarding. I had always admired the songs in A Little Night Music, so I was thrilled when Richard Eyre asked me to play Desiréên Phillips; Armfeldt. The role of my mother was played by Sia she is only a year or so older than me, but that didn’t trouble her a bit. ‘We’ll do it all with wigs,’ she said. In fact she had asked the director, Sean Mathias, if she could play that part before she knew who was to play Desirée, because she was as mad about Stephen Sondheim’s score as I was. I would have to take something from it to my Desert Island, if the BBC ever asked me to do Desert Island Discs again.